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Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

Could you elaborate on what made it bad?

I am a web developer too, and for me, the biggest annoyance is feature inconsistency between browsers. Only yesterday, I was cursing under my breath, because webkit-based browsers allow scrollbar styling, but firefox doesn't. In our org, we have embraced CSS grid, but by doing so, made a conscious decision to finally ignore IE11 (rather than to use @supports and write fallback CSS for browsers that are left behind). Even considering the wildly improbable scenario that browser monopoly would lead to feature stagnation - at least you will have a single target with a known set of features to develop against. How can this be worse than what we have now?

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In terms of being a platform for applications, the browser landscape today is paradise on earth compared to the hellscape we endured in the early 2000s while trying to develop apps for IE6.

Just focussing on the browser itself:

* Today's developers enjoy a large and rich platform of (relatively) bug free functionality and APIs on which to build. The hellscape had very limited APIs and were riddled with bugs. For a long time IE and the other browsers didn't even agree on how to compute the width/height of an element w.r.t. padding and borders. (CSS box-models did not match!). We spent a lot of time just working around bugs and keeping up to date on the latest work-arounds for all the problems.

* Today's browsers have high performance JS JITs with very few user visible bugs. The hellscape had slow buggy JS implementations. I remember having to unregister event handlers on page unload otherwise the browser would leak memory.

* Today's browsers have excellent debugging tools built in. In the hellscape, if you had a trailing comma in a JS list on IE, it would give an error message (pop up) with either no file and line number or a bogus one. Yes, that bad.

Even when supporting just one browser, development was often a miserable experience. MS had won the browser war and was trying to kill the idea of apps on the web by neglect. It wasn't until Firefox got going that things improved.

> In terms of being a platform for applications, the browser landscape today is paradise on earth compared to the hellscape we endured

I completely agree, but the points that you then make simply show how modern browsers are vastly better than the old ones. I love developing for a modern browser, such as Chrome. I just fail to see how the claim that having competing browser engines that do not have complete feature parity can be in any way considered desirable by web developers. I can understand this argument from end users' perspective (and even then not quite, because remember the days when sites would say that they were "best viewed in Netscape Navigator", or when you could watch Apple keynote presentation on Apple's site only in Safari?), but not from web developer's perspective. Wouldn't a single healthily evolving browser engine be better from web developer's point of view than multiple engines, each with its quirks?

Fair enough. I'll try to tie it back to the mono-culture question.

The primary reason why the hellscape was bad, and remained bad for so long, was because we had a single "winner" of the browser wars. Microsoft won and they immediately tried to strangle the web for years. There were no alternative browsers for a long time to provide some kind of competition which might improve the matter. Sure, we could just test on IE and only support IE, but it was still an awful browser and MS wanted it that way.

The point is that the bad "technical" level situation was sustained by the browser political mono-culture. I'm somewhat positive now about the current situation with MS getting more involved because it will add more diversity to our current political browser situation. This should translate into better results for everyone on all levels, technical, user, privacy (I hope), etc.

So maybe from a pure browser engine point of view there is the same or less diversity, but this situation is very different from the early 2000s one.

Stagnation was the biggest problem. Stagnation is not the problem with Chromium; in fact, it's the opposite, and that's really what's forced Microsoft's hand. They were simply wasting resources playing catch up to Chromium. Why bother?

scrollbar styling flat shouldn't be allowed.

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